Due to their scale, extensive built environment, and efforts to grow the city from within, London and Tokyo face similar urban development issues but occupy cultural contexts in which themes of proximity, privacy, community, and public space take on different meanings and require distinct solutions. The housing projects of Nishizawa and Taylor show how inhabitants can live in a house, and, at the same time, enlarge the scale of their living to the neighbourhood and the city. They introduce, within the specificity of their cultures and philosophies, the idea that a housing project is a way of contributing to the atmosphere, the character and the life of the city.